TY - JOUR A1 - Bazhenova, Ekaterina A1 - Zerbato, Francesca A1 - Oliboni, Barbara A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - From BPMN process models to DMN decision models JF - Information systems N2 - The interplay between process and decision models plays a crucial role in business process management, as decisions may be based on running processes and affect process outcomes. Often process models include decisions that are encoded through process control flow structures and data flow elements, thus reducing process model maintainability. The Decision Model and Notation (DMN) was proposed to achieve separation of concerns and to possibly complement the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) for designing decisions related to process models. Nevertheless, deriving decision models from process models remains challenging, especially when the same data underlie both process and decision models. In this paper, we explore how and to which extent the data modeled in BPMN processes and used for decision-making may be represented in the corresponding DMN decision models. To this end, we identify a set of patterns that capture possible representations of data in BPMN processes and that can be used to guide the derivation of decision models related to existing process models. Throughout the paper we refer to real-world healthcare processes to show the applicability of the proposed approach. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. KW - Business process models KW - Decision models KW - BPMN KW - DMN KW - Pattern Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2019.02.001 SN - 0306-4379 SN - 1873-6076 VL - 83 SP - 69 EP - 88 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Combi, Carlo A1 - Oliboni, Barbara A1 - Weske, Mathias A1 - Zerbato, Francesca T1 - Seamless conceptual modeling of processes with transactional and analytical data JF - Data & knowledge engineering N2 - In the field of Business Process Management (BPM), modeling business processes and related data is a critical issue since process activities need to manage data stored in databases. The connection between processes and data is usually handled at the implementation level, even if modeling both processes and data at the conceptual level should help designers in improving business process models and identifying requirements for implementation. Especially in data -and decision-intensive contexts, business process activities need to access data stored both in databases and data warehouses. In this paper, we complete our approach for defining a novel conceptual view that bridges process activities and data. The proposed approach allows the designer to model the connection between business processes and database models and define the operations to perform, providing interesting insights on the overall connected perspective and hints for identifying activities that are crucial for decision support. KW - Conceptual modeling KW - Business process modeling KW - BPMN KW - Data modeling KW - Data warehouse KW - Decision support Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2021.101895 SN - 0169-023X SN - 1872-6933 VL - 134 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Herzberg, Nico A1 - Meyer, Andreas A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Improving business process intelligence by observing object state transitions JF - Data & knowledge engineering N2 - During the execution of business processes several events happen that are recorded in the company's information systems. These events deliver insights into process executions so that process monitoring and analysis can be performed resulting, for instance, in prediction of upcoming process steps or the analysis of the run time of single steps. While event capturing is trivial when a process engine with integrated logging capabilities is used, manual process execution environments do not provide automatic logging of events, so that typically external devices, like bar code scanners, have to be used. As experience shows, these manual steps are error-prone and induce additional work. Therefore, we use object state transitions as additional monitoring information, so-called object state transition events. Based on these object state transition events, we reason about the enablement and termination of activities and provide the basis for process monitoring and analysis in terms of a large event log. In this paper, we present the concept to utilize information from these object state transition events for capturing process progress. Furthermore, we discuss a methodology to create the required design time artifacts that then are used for monitoring at run time. In a proof-of-concept implementation, we show how the design time and run time side work and prove applicability of the introduced concept of object state transition events. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. KW - Business process management KW - Events KW - Data KW - Process Monitoring KW - BPMN Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2015.07.008 SN - 0169-023X SN - 1872-6933 VL - 98 SP - 144 EP - 164 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Leopold, Henrik A1 - Mendling, Jan A1 - Guenther, Oliver T1 - Learning from Quality Issues of BPMN Models from Industry JF - IEEE software N2 - Many organizations use business process models to document business operations and formalize business requirements in software-engineering projects. The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), a specification by the Object Management Group, has evolved into the leading standard for process modeling. One challenge is BPMN's complexity: it offers a huge variety of elements and often several representational choices for the same semantics. This raises the question of how well modelers can deal with these choices. Empirical insights into BPMN use from the practitioners' perspective are still missing. To close this gap, researchers analyzed 585 BPMN 2.0 process models from six companies. They found that split and join representations, message flow, the lack of proper model decomposition, and labeling related to quality issues. They give five specific recommendations on how to avoid these issues. KW - process model quality KW - modeling guidelines KW - Business Process Model and Notation KW - BPMN KW - industry study KW - software engineering KW - software development Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2015.81 SN - 0740-7459 SN - 1937-4194 VL - 33 SP - 26 EP - 33 PB - Inst. of Electr. and Electronics Engineers CY - Los Alamitos ER - TY - BOOK A1 - Lübbe, Alexander T1 - The effect of tangible media on individuals in business process modeling : a controlled experiment = Der Einfluss greifbarer Medien auf einzelne Personen bei der Geschäftsprozessmodellierung : ein kontrolliertes Experiment N2 - In current practice, business processes modeling is done by trained method experts. Domain experts are interviewed to elicit their process information but not involved in modeling. We created a haptic toolkit for process modeling that can be used in process elicitation sessions with domain experts. We hypothesize that this leads to more effective process elicitation. This paper brakes down "effective elicitation" to 14 operationalized hypotheses. They are assessed in a controlled experiment using questionnaires, process model feedback tests and video analysis. The experiment compares our approach to structured interviews in a repeated measurement design. We executed the experiment with 17 student clerks from a trade school. They represent potential users of the tool. Six out of fourteen hypotheses showed significant difference due to the method applied. Subjects reported more fun and more insights into process modeling with tangible media. Video analysis showed significantly more reviews and corrections applied during process elicitation. Moreover, people take more time to talk and think about their processes. We conclude that tangible media creates a different working mode for people in process elicitation with fun, new insights and instant feedback on preliminary results. N2 - Heute, werden Geschäftsprozesse durch speziell ausgebildete Modellierungsexperten erstellt. Wissensträger der Domäne werden befragt, aber sie werden nicht in die Modellierung einbezogen. Wir haben ein haptisches Werkzeug zur Prozessmodellierung entwickelt welches bei der Prozesserhebung zusammen mit den Domänenexperten eingesetzt wird. Wir vertreten die Hypothese, dass dies zur effizienteren Prozesserhebung beiträgt. In diesem Artikel schlüsseln wir "effiziente Prozesserhebung" in 14 operationalisierte Hypothesen auf. Diese werden in einem kontrollierten Experiment mit Hilfe von Fragebögen, Tests und Videoanalyse untersucht. In dem Experiment vergleichen wir unseren Ansatz mit strukturierten Interviews in einem Messwiederholungsdesign. Das Experiment wurde mit 17 Schülern kaufmännischer Berufe in einem Oberstufenzentrum durchgeführt. Sie repräsentieren potentielle Anwender unseres Ansatzes zu Prozesserhebung. Sechs der vierzehn Hypothesen zeigten einen signifikanten Unterschied zwischen den beiden Ansätzen. Teilnehmer berichteten mehr Spass an und mehr Erkenntnisse durch greifbare Prozessmodellierung zu haben. In der Videoanalyse beobachteten wir, dass Teilnehmer häufiger Ihre Aussagen prüfen und korrigieren. Außerdem wurde mehr Zeit für das Reden und Nachdenken über die Prozesse verwendet. Wir schlussfolgern, dass greifbare Medien ein anderes Arbeitsumfeld begünstigen mit mehr Spaß, neuen Erkenntnissen und direktem Feedback auf vorläufige Ergebnisse. T3 - Technische Berichte des Hasso-Plattner-Instituts für Digital Engineering an der Universität Potsdam - 41 KW - Prozessmodellierung KW - erfahrbare Medien KW - Individuen KW - Prozesserhebung KW - BPMN KW - t.BPM KW - kontrolliertes Experiment KW - Process Modeling KW - tangible media KW - individuals KW - process elicitation KW - BPMN KW - t.BPM KW - controlled experiment Y1 - 2011 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-49001 SN - 978-3-86956-108-0 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - THES A1 - Mandal, Sankalita T1 - Event handling in business processes T1 - Ereignisbehandlung in Geschäftsprozessen BT - flexible event subscription for business process enactment BT - flexibles Ereignisabonnement für die Durchführung von Geschäftsprozessen N2 - Business process management (BPM) deals with modeling, executing, monitoring, analyzing, and improving business processes. During execution, the process communicates with its environment to get relevant contextual information represented as events. Recent development of big data and the Internet of Things (IoT) enables sources like smart devices and sensors to generate tons of events which can be filtered, grouped, and composed to trigger and drive business processes. The industry standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) provides several event constructs to capture the interaction possibilities between a process and its environment, e.g., to instantiate a process, to abort an ongoing activity in an exceptional situation, to take decisions based on the information carried by the events, as well as to choose among the alternative paths for further process execution. The specifications of such interactions are termed as event handling. However, in a distributed setup, the event sources are most often unaware of the status of process execution and therefore, an event is produced irrespective of the process being ready to consume it. BPMN semantics does not support such scenarios and thus increases the chance of processes getting delayed or getting in a deadlock by missing out on event occurrences which might still be relevant. The work in this thesis reviews the challenges and shortcomings of integrating real-world events into business processes, especially the subscription management. The basic integration is achieved with an architecture consisting of a process modeler, a process engine, and an event processing platform. Further, points of subscription and unsubscription along the process execution timeline are defined for different BPMN event constructs. Semantic and temporal dependencies among event subscription, event occurrence, event consumption and event unsubscription are considered. To this end, an event buffer with policies for updating the buffer, retrieving the most suitable event for the current process instance, and reusing the event has been discussed that supports issuing of early subscription. The Petri net mapping of the event handling model provides our approach with a translation of semantics from a business process perspective. Two applications based on this formal foundation are presented to support the significance of different event handling configurations on correct process execution and reachability of a process path. Prototype implementations of the approaches show that realizing flexible event handling is feasible with minor extensions of off-the-shelf process engines and event platforms. N2 - Das Prozessmanagement befasst sich mit der Modellierung, Ausführung, Überwachung, Analyse und Verbesserung von Geschäftsprozessen. Während seiner Ausführung kommuniziert der Prozess mit seiner Umgebung, um relevante Kontextinformationen in Form von Ereignissen zu erhalten. Der jüngste Fortschritt im Bereich Big Data und dem Internet der Dinge ermöglicht Smart Devices und Sensoren eine Vielzahl von Ereignissen zu generieren, welche gefiltert, gruppiert und kombiniert werden können, um Geschäftsprozesse zu triggern und vor anzutreiben. Der Industriestandard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) stellt mehrere Ereigniskonstrukte bereit, um die Interaktionsmöglichkeiten eines Prozesses mit seiner Umgebung zu erfassen. Beispielsweise können Prozesse durch Ereignisse gestartet, laufende Aktivitäten in Ausnahmefällen abgebrochen, Entscheidungen auf Basis der Ereignisinformationen getroffen, und alternative Ausführungspfade gewählt werden. Die Spezifikation solcher Interaktionen wird als Event Handling bezeichnet. Allerdings sind sich insbesondere in verteilten Systemen die Ereignisquellen des Zustands des Prozesses unbewusst. Daher werden Ereignisse unabhängig davon produziert, ob der Prozess bereit ist sie zu konsumieren. Die BPMN-Semantik sieht solche Situationen jedoch nicht vor, sodass die Möglichkeit besteht, dass das Auftreten von relevanten Ereignissen versäumt wird. Dies kann zu Verzögerungen oder gar Deadlocks in der Prozessauführung führen. Die vorliegende Dissertation untersucht die Mängel und Herausforderungen der Integration von Ereignissen und Geschäftsprozessen, insbesondere in Bezug auf das Subscription Management. Die grundlegende Integration wird durch eine Architektur erreicht, die aus einer Prozessmodellierungskomponente, einer Ausführungskomponente und einer Ereignisverarbeitungskomponente besteht. Ferner werden Points of Subscription and Unsubscription für verschiedene BPMN-Ereigniskonstrukte entlang der Zeitachse der Prozessausführung definiert. Semantische und temporale Abhängigkeiten zwischen der Subscription, dem Auftreten, dem Konsumieren und der Unsubscription eines Ereignisses werden betrachtet. In dieser Hinsicht wird ein Event Bufferdiskutiert, welcher mit Strategien zum Update des Puffers, zum Abruf der geeigneten Ereignisse für den laufenden Prozess, sowie zur Wiederverwendung von Ereignissen ausgestattet ist. Die Abbildung des Event Handling Modells in ein Petri-Netz versieht den beschriebenen Ansatz mit einer eindeutigen Semantik. Basierend auf diesem Formalismus werden zwei Anwendungen demonstriert, die die Relevanz verschiedener Konfigurationen des Event Handlings für eine korrekte Prozessausführung aufzeigen. Eine prototypische Implementierung des Ansatzes beweist dessen Umsetzbarkeit durch geringe Erweiterungen bestehender Software zur Prozessausführung und Ereignisverarbeitung. KW - business process managament KW - complex event processing KW - BPMN KW - event subscription KW - Geschäftsprozessmanagement KW - komplexe Ereignisverarbeitung KW - BPMN KW - Ereignisabonnement Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-441700 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Meyer, Andreas A1 - Pufahl, Luise A1 - Batoulis, Kimon A1 - Fahland, Dirk A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Automating data exchange in process choreographies JF - Information systems N2 - Communication between organizations is formalized as process choreographies in daily business. While the correct ordering of exchanged messages can be modeled and enacted with current choreography techniques, no approach exists to describe and automate the exchange of data between processes in a choreography using messages. This paper describes an entirely model-driven approach for BPMN introducing a few concepts that suffice to model data retrieval, data transformation, message exchange, and correlation four aspects of data exchange. For automation, this work utilizes a recent concept to enact data dependencies in internal processes. We present a modeling guideline to derive local process models from a given choreography; their operational semantics allows to correctly enact the entire choreography from the derived models only including the exchange of data. Targeting on successful interactions, we discuss means to ensure correct process choreography modeling. Finally, we implemented our approach by extending the camunda BPM platform with our approach and show its feasibility by realizing all service interaction patterns using only model-based concepts. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. KW - Process modeling KW - Data modeling KW - Process choreographies KW - Data exchange KW - BPMN KW - SQL Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2015.03.008 SN - 0306-4379 SN - 1873-6076 VL - 53 SP - 296 EP - 329 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - BOOK A1 - Meyer, Andreas A1 - Pufahl, Luise A1 - Fahland, Dirk A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Modeling and enacting complex data dependencies in business processes N2 - Enacting business processes in process engines requires the coverage of control flow, resource assignments, and process data. While the first two aspects are well supported in current process engines, data dependencies need to be added and maintained manually by a process engineer. Thus, this task is error-prone and time-consuming. In this report, we address the problem of modeling processes with complex data dependencies, e.g., m:n relationships, and their automatic enactment from process models. First, we extend BPMN data objects with few annotations to allow data dependency handling as well as data instance differentiation. Second, we introduce a pattern-based approach to derive SQL queries from process models utilizing the above mentioned extensions. Therewith, we allow automatic enactment of data-aware BPMN process models. We implemented our approach for the Activiti process engine to show applicability. N2 - Die Ausführung von Geschäftsprozessen in Process Engines benötigt Informationen über den Kontrollfluss, die Rollenzuordnungen und die Datenabhängigkeiten. Während die ersten beiden Aspekte bereits automatisiert von Process Engines unterstützt werden, müssen die Datenabhängigkeiten durch einen Prozessingenieur manuell hinzugefügt und gewartet werden. Allerdings ist diese Aufgabe sehr fehleranfällig und zeitintensiv. In diesem Report zeigen wir wie Prozesse mit komplexen Datenabhängigkeiten, z.B. m:n Beziehungen, modelliert und automatisiert ausgeführt werden können. Dazu erweitern wir zuerst BPMN Datenobjekte mit wenigen Annotationen, um das Handling von Datenabhängikeiten sowie die Differenzierung von Datenobjektinstanzen zu ermöglichen. Danach beschreiben wir einen Pattern-basierten Ansatz, um SQL-Queries, unter Nutzung der oben erwähnten Erweiterungen, aus Prozessmodellen abzuleiten. Damit erlauben wir die automatisierte Ausführung von Daten-orientierten BPMN Prozessmodellen. Um die Anwendbarkeit unseres Ansatzen zu demonstieren, implementierten wir ihn für die Process Engine Activiti. T3 - Technische Berichte des Hasso-Plattner-Instituts für Digital Engineering an der Universität Potsdam - 74 KW - Prozessmodellierung KW - Datenmodellierung KW - Prozessausführung KW - BPMN KW - SQL KW - Process Modeling KW - Data Modeling KW - Process Enactment KW - BPMN KW - SQL Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-65103 SN - 978-3-86956-245-2 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - GEN A1 - Pufahl, Luise A1 - Wong, Tsun Yin A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Design of an extensible BPMN process simulator T2 - Business Process Management Workshops (BPM 2017) N2 - Business process simulation is an important means for quantitative analysis of a business process and to compare different process alternatives. With the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) being the state-of-the-art language for the graphical representation of business processes, many existing process simulators support already the simulation of BPMN diagrams. However, they do not provide well-defined interfaces to integrate new concepts in the simulation environment. In this work, we present the design and architecture of a proof-of-concept implementation of an open and extensible BPMN process simulator. It also supports the simulation of multiple BPMN processes at a time and relies on the building blocks of the well-founded discrete event simulation. The extensibility is assured by a plug-in concept. Its feasibility is demonstrated by extensions supporting new BPMN concepts, such as the simulation of business rule activities referencing decision models and batch activities. KW - Business process simulation KW - Extensibility KW - BPMN Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-3-319-74030-0 SN - 978-3-319-74029-4 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74030-0_62 SN - 1865-1348 VL - 308 SP - 782 EP - 795 PB - Springer CY - Berlin ER -